I have been testing Google drive on this device with every firmware release since 6.7.x. I am currently running 6.9.3.
I wanted to list a number of issues and observations I have made in regards to this app. I hope it will help others in the community as well as get some help for myself. Since I will be covering so many topics I may want to break this out into multiple threads but for how it is just a master list.
#1 Netgears website is really annoying. It doesn't give you a way to report a bug without paying for support service. It doesn't even give you a link and a suggestion to come here into the forums for help from the community and maybe some help from Netgear. That is extremely unfreindly for a user who is looking for help.
#2 The fact that this main instruction page is missing vital information is sad. https://kb.netgear.com/000038420/ReadyNAS-OS-6-7-Sync-with-Google-Drive# It should mention that there is an EXTREMELY useful button that you can use to watch what the app is currently/historicaly doing. So many people on thi very forum are asking questions that could be answered if they just knew to click that button and watch. They whould know when the device is syncing or just doing an index scan ect.
#3 This app has a VERY bad flaw in how it is designed to Startup and run. I call this the Live sync not started issue. When you start or restart the sync service it will go through the following steps in this order.
Start the sync service
Index the local files
Index the cloud files
Download/upload the missing files OR download a duplicate file if the files are slightly different. (that is something that causes problems and I will discuss more on this later.)
Last it will start the LIVE sync service.
It is very possible in envronments like mine that this restart could take a couple days. So in my case the live sync won't be running for a couple days. Here is why. I have 9TB of data synced on one of these devices. The local file index is fast and only takes a second or two. But the cloud index takes about 30-40 minutes. That is all on Google's side. After that 30-40 minute wait the app has a list of files that it needs to download/upload. If that is a long list then it chould take several hours or even days. In my case I had added 3TB of data that was not synced to the Google Cloud side. I restarted the sync service and after 35 mintues it started to download the missing 3TB of data. It took 38 hours to download. Then the live sync was started. So I had gone for almost 2 full days with the live sync service NOT running. All of the files that were added/removed or modified during that time were not getting synced. At the end of the 38 hours the live sync started and it ONLY started syncing the file changes it saw from that point on. 38 hours of files changes were completely missed and skipped even though the sync app was running. In order to capture these missing file edits I had to restart the service again and let it Find the files that were added/removed. Again it took about 2 hours and the live sync service was down during that time. I consider this to be a bug. It should be fixed before this app comes out of beta. The live sync should start right after the file index scans.
I think some of the users complaining that BiDirectional sync doesn't work are running into this problem. They just don't realize that their Test edits are being ignored until the log says live sync is started.
#5 As I mentioned in that last topic the sync will sometimes run into a file that has been modified/renamed when the live sync isn't running. The app just downloads a duplicate copy and renames it. In my opinion this should be a user setting. I would rather be able to tell the app which copy to keep. I would set it to keep the Cloud version and overwrite the local copy or visa versa in other environments. Or just tell it to keep the file with the most recent modified date.
#6 This one is really frusterating. I call it the Flagged for abuse lockup. It only affects downloads. Uploads are not affected directly. In the 9TB of data are some files that Google has flagged for abuse. Allegedly these files break some form of copywright or something. When Google flaggs a file for abuse it can't be synced using any sync app on any platform. Even the apps that google has provided "Google Sync", "Google drive sync", "Google Drive file Stream" they all fail to copy the files. I am ok with this behaviour. I am not happy with how this ReadyNAS app is handleing it. This app will attempt to download the flagged file and it will just get stuck. The log will say the date and time that it started the download but then it will do nothing. This app can download up to 3 files at a time from what I can see. So if only one flagged file is encountered it will still continue to function with up to 2 downloads at once. If it encounters more flagged files it will eventually think it is still downloading all the files it can handle. At that point it will not download or upload any files at all. The entire sync service is just stuck. There are no error messages. It just stops working. All you can do is restart the service and hope those files are the last ones it runs into. I have been removing these flagged files from our envinronment but this Flagged for abuse lockup has got to be considered a bug and it should be fixed. The app should use the Google drive API to identify the file as being flagged and instead of trying to download the file it should just write a line in the log saying the file is flagged for abuse and will not be downloaded. If Google hasn't provided that ability in the API then you need to setup a timout on the download attempt and give up after a time and write that into the log. This app should NOT leave Beta with this bug still in place.
I am running out of time for today so I will end here for now. Please pass some of this information along to the developers of this app.
I hope this helps identify some problems to work on before the app comes out of Beta. I also hope this helps some of the users to understand whay they may be encountering.
Just adding to the excellent post above. Just updated to 6.9.4 - All the Beta labelling has been removed so apparently, we are to believe this is now release grade software. Just to point out that this App is still not fit for purpose. If you use Google Docs, sheets etc. as part of your enterprise workflow, they are NOT downloaded from Google Drive onto the NAS device. This is at variance with other vendors implementations (Synology for example). If you are considering buying a ReadNAS and expecting to use it in this way then I would think again. As pointed out above, there are serious shortcomings with this App / Add on and the docuementation is both unhelpful and misleading. There is also no response to anything posted here and as pointed out above you have to pay to report a bug. The left image below is my actual google drive and the right hand one is the ReadyNAS - I can find no documentation to either confirm or even justify this exclusion. Any clues ?
